Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by UncleMeat 1108 days ago
And yet, the actual data does not demonstrate that having ISIS members on Twitter reduces their numbers.

You are free to go to their spaces and talk to them if you want. But there is no moral need or practical good to permit their hatred in all spaces.

1 comments

I hate to keep repeating this in this thread because I don't want to sound like a broken record, but it feels like you're engaging in a textbook example of the McNamara fallacy. It seems like the only thing you're able to measure is "number of bad guys", so that's the only metric for success/failure you have.

What if the more important metric for a good society was something else?

What if removing "the bad guys" from society makes them feel like they're not part of society and have nothing else left to lose so it actually pushes them to violence?

I'm not saying I have all of the answers here, but I do strongly think that your general approach here is ignoring the human side and focusing on the wrong metric for progress.